The original birds demo was done by Mr.Doob based on the boids simulation. You can read more about behind the scene of The Wilderness Downtown and the flocks of birds simulation from his blog here. (Thank Mr. Doob for your awesome Three.js library and the nice bird demo.)

The significant adaptations that I made to this school of fishes simulation are: the fish objects are PlaneGeometry with bitmap texture; some tweaks to the boids' speed and movement to make them more fish-like; and making the fish wiggle its tail instead of bird wings' flapping.

This fish and the bird demos are used in my side-project for my friend's HTML5 portfolio.

10 May 2012

When I visited this cave during the trip to the central provinces of Viet Nam. I wanted to capture it magnificence and beauty but the cave's texture was too complex to visualize its depth and space on 2D photos. I recalled this 3D photography technique and tried to take some stereo photos of the scenes (take 2 photos of the same scene from 2 slightly different position) and made them into 3D stereo animation when I get back.

Traditionally, these 3D stereo images are presented by a 2-frame animated GIF. But GIF images are not efficient for live photographs and they normally take up more bytes than JPG for large pictures so I decided to use CSS and JavaScript to reproduce the animation with JPG photos.

Basically, the JPG is set as background of a div which has dimensions of half of the image. JS will shift the background-position at intervals revealing half of the background one at a time. And here's the results.

During the making of the effect, I also explored its possibility with CSS3 animation and steps() function. The result is the same without any coding. But for the sake of compatibility for the audience, the said demo still use JS. I put the CSS3 solution on Dabblet for later reference of similar 2-state animation. Check it out.